Some 100,000 years ago, six of our Neanderthal cousins experienced a tragic end in the hands of their compatriots.
In a cave in southeastern France, two adults, two adolescents aged 12 to 15 years and two children aged just 4 years were eaten by other Neanderthals.
Archaeologists have long recognized that Neanderthals were occasional cannibals. The skeletons found on the cave site show obvious traces of human consumption, such as cutting marks and nibbled finger bones.
But the reason for this behavior has not been well understood so far.
In a study published this month in the Journal of Archaeological Science, French researchers suggest that Neanderthals were reluctant cannibals who were forced to eat themselves when they did not have other readily available food sources. .
Why was there so little to eat? Climate change.
"It took exceptional conditions for human flesh to become meat," said Business Insider's Alban Defleur, co-author of the study.
An exhibition at the Neanderthal Man Museum in Krapina, Croatia, shows the life of a Neanderthal family in a cave on February 25, 2010. Reuters / Nikola Solic
A cave that has not been disturbed for tens of thousands of years
The 120 or so bones found in these six unfortunate victims of cannibalism were discovered in the 1990s in the small cave of Baume Moula-Guercy, in the Rhone Valley, in the south-east of France. Defleur co-authored a 1999 study in the journal Science that documented the findings.
"More than half of these remains had cutting marks made with flint tools," said Defleur.
This index, along with signs of clubbing on the femurs and skulls of the Neanderthals, indicate that the brain, bone marrow and flesh of the deceased were consumed.
Cut marks on a fragmented skull of a Neanderthal teenager discovered in the Baume Moula-Guercy cave. Alban Defleur
Nearly two decades after this first discovery, Defleur and his co-author Emmanuel Desclaux tried to understand why these individuals had been consumed by members of their own species.
To do this, scientists examined a specific layer of the cave, the layer XV.
The Baume Moula-Guercy cave has 19 archaeological layers superimposed on each other in a chronological order representing a period of about 100,000 years. This allowed the researchers to compare the types of species living together during different periods and the climate at those times.
Layer XV – only 16 inches thick – included not only the cannibalized Neanderthal remains, but also everything they left behind, including the remains of chimneys, charcoal, flint tools and the bones of animals. These items were fossilized continuously, in a layer "unprecedented on the European continent" for the fossilized remains of this period, said Defleur.
Climate change limits Neanderthals hunting
The content of layer XV revealed what the environment was 128,000 to 114,000 years ago, at a time called the last interglacial period (ie between ice ages).
The cave of Baume Moula-Guercy is rare; Defleur notes that very few archaeological sites dating from this interglacial period exist. Researchers therefore have little knowledge of how climate change affects the lifestyle of Neanderthals.
Defleur and Desclaux found that the climate of Neanderthals was 4 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than today, and that it had gone from a colder climate to an extremely rapid warming. .
The researchers searched layer XV in the Baume Moula-Guercy cave. Courtesy of Alban Defleur and Emmanuel Desclaux
This change has been the biggest global warming that our planet has known over the past 400,000 years, said Defleur.
"Were not [talking] geological, but rather on a human scale, "Desclaux told Cosmos. "Maybe in a few generations, the landscape has changed completely."
In addition, fossilized animal bones enabled researchers to discover what European fauna and flora looked like before, during and after this period of brutal warming.
Defleur and Desclaux found that climate change led to the development of dense forests in Europe and, as a result, the disappearance of large mammals that Neanderthals generally hunted, such as bison, reindeer and mammoth. This lack of traditional prey left them without enough food, which may explain why they resorted to cannibalism.
Reluctant cannibals
According to the study's authors, an important piece of evidence supporting their hypothesis that Neanderthals eat only members of their species out of despair comes from the enamel of the dead Neanderthals' teeth. . An analysis of their molars revealed severe and prolonged deficiencies, signs of malnutrition.
Read more: Old dental plaque reveals what our missing human parents have actually eaten
Defleur stated that similar enamel studies had been conducted at two other sites where cannibalized Neanderthals had been found, and that they had found the same signs.
According to the authors of the study, of the 220 European sites containing human remains belonging to the Neanderthal lineage, only four sites, including this one, show evidence of Neanderthal cannibalism. The other three are in Croatia, Belgium and Spain.
Defleur, however, stated that archaeologists have found 17 sites with 34 individual burials, indicating that Neanderthals have ritually buried their dead. For him, this suggests that cannibalism was the exception rather than the rule.
"The low number of confirmed cases of cannibalism among Neanderthals also shows us that they probably have the same taboo as we do about the consumption of human flesh, otherwise the cases would be much more numerous," he said. "Only the survival of the group allowed them to break this possible moral ban."
